The significance of Human Virginity in the Bible:
Physiologically, only the human female has a distinctively perceived sign of virginity, the hymen. The presence of such in the backdrop for ‘evidence of virginity in of brides:
Deuteronomy 22:13-17
"If any man takes a wife and goes in to her and then turns against her, and charges her with shameful deeds and publicly defames her, and says, 'I took this woman, but when I came near her, I did not find her a virgin,' then the girl's father and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of the girl's virginity to the elders of the city at the gate.
"The girl's father shall say to the elders, 'I gave my daughter to this man for a wife, but he turned against her; and behold, he has charged her with shameful deeds, saying, "I did not find your daughter a virgin." But this is the evidence of my daughter's virginity.' And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city.
Here ‘the evidence of the girl’s virginity’ was ‘the garments’. The gown brides wore for the very purpose of evidencing their required virginity. And why? Because the virginity’s physical, soulical (emotions, thoughts and desired intentions), and spiritual life principles are not to be lost but to be transferred, shared and imparted to one’s life long spouse.
Here we find the physical proof a torn Hymen will generally produce: blood.
And gives us the prime means of oneness: Covenant of Blood.
For the Israelite male, circumcision, the cutting of his foreskin, made him one in covenant with God, a covenant of blood. His virginity was given to God. He now belonged to God. His virginity never was lost; it is now the foundation of his covenant relation with God. The first fruit of his virility, of his ability to continue life, was connected now to the source where it came from: God Himself. The covenant with God was purposely established by blood from man’s foreskin. Not from blood from another part of the human body. Here is the key to understand why: in the sacredness of God’s Person, He created male humans with for-skinned pennies to claim for Himself life’s conduit and penetrating organ of the deepest physical union; the organ that is the ‘Hymen cutter’, the ‘cutter’ that was cut (covenanted) with God.
1Co 7:12-14
“But to the rest I say, not the Lord, that if any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she consents to live with him, he must not divorce her.
And a woman who has an unbelieving husband, and he consents to live with her, she must not send her husband away.
For the unbelieving husband is sanctified through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified through her believing husband; for otherwise your children are unclean, but now they are holy.”
In marriage, a penetrated Hymen is, ideally, the seal of the blood covenant between husband and wife before God Almighty.
For a Christian, his union with Christ, is validated and re-imparted over and over again when we partake of His body and His blood through the Celebration of the Lord’s Death and all the other means of impartation of Grace: freely given divine abilities and qualities.
1 Corinthians 6:13-18
Food is for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God will do away with both of them. Yet the body* is not for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.
Now God has not only raised the Lord, but will also raise us up through His power.
Do you not know that your bodies* are members of Christ? Shall I then take away the members* of Christ and make them members* of a prostitute? May it never be! Or do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one body with her? For He says, "THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH." But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.
Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body*, but the immoral man sins against his own body.*
*note: this is said in these passages specifically of our sexual organs
The expression “…For He says, "THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH”, is a quote from Genesis chapter 2:21-25
“So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
The man said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man."
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.”
“…and they shall become one flesh.” In Genesis this phrase is spoken of the union or copulation of a man and his wife as they become one flesh, in the consummation or completed act of marriage: sexual intercourse. We see that they are now ‘one flesh’, one entity, a unit; they are now part of each other. Even before there is a conception, they are one. What happens at conception already happened at copulation. Conception is just the finished product.
“…and they shall become one flesh.” In 1 Corinthians this same principle is effective even if it is fornication; unification has occurred. They are one in sin, one in disobedience, one unity in every way as if they were married, but they are not. So instead of a blessing, they are now under a curse; they disobeyed God. They have sinned against their own bodies’ divinely intended purpose.
Romans 1:24
Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.
Such unions create evil soul ties. Things from one person are poured out into the others:
Ezekiel 23:7, 8
“Thus she committed her whoredoms with them, with all them that were the chosen men of Assyria, and with all on whom she doted: with all their idols she defiled herself. Neither left she her whoredoms brought from Egypt: for in her youth they lay with her, and they bruised the breasts of her virginity, and poured their whoredom upon her.”
Here God is using the dynamics of sexual sins to illustrated the idolatry of His people; to give a better understanding of their sins and help them relate to Him: as Israel’s idolatry gave them something that made them recipients of other peoples’ lusts and dynamics about sin by a transference "… poured their whoredom upon her…", immoral people carry each other’s whoredom and share evil soul ties.
This is the main reason many sexually immoral people cannot be duly unified in marriage; they carry within them the evil union with others they have copulated in any form of sexual act that is outside Biblically mandated marriage.
Hebrews 13:4
“Marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled; for fornicators and adulterers God will judge.”
The marriage bed is defiled by all previous and present sexual gratifications outside of the person we are in covenant of marriage with. Most of those who have fornicated and then marry someone else, testify of having in mind ‘the others’ as they are in copulation with their own spouse. They have difficulties zeroing in on their spouses. They lust, covet, long, daydream and reminiscence of the ‘others’ while they copulate with their spouses. And thus committing adultery in their heart; contaminating or defiling their marriage bed. No wander the divorce rate is higher among couples that cohabited sexually before marriage than those that didn’t.*
*(“Contrary to conventional wisdom, cohabitation can be harmful to marriage as well as to the couples and their children. One study based on the National Survey of Families and Households found that marriages which had prior cohabitors were 46% more likely to divorce than marriages of noncohabitors. The authors concluded from this study and from a review of previous studies that the risk of marital disruption following cohabitation "is beginning to take on the status of an empirical generalization.")
Alfred DeMaris and K. Vaninadha Rao, "Premarital Cohabitation and Subsequent Marital Stability in the United States: A Reassessment," Journal of Marriage and Family 54(1992), 178-190.